The black dog and Black Shuck: the Bungay storm of 1577
The black dog of Bungay and Blythburgh in Abraham Fleming's account, the Barghest, the Gytrash of Jane Eyre and Faust's poodle: the dog as phantom.
Man's faithful companion, the dog is also, in European tradition, an ambiguous presence linked to death and to the world of the dead. In England this ambiguity gave rise to a whole family of legends about spectral black dogs, large animals with burning eyes that appear at night along lonely roads or near churchyards. The most famous is Black Shuck, the black dog of East Anglia, tied to a documented episode of 1577.
From Cerberus to the hounds of Hecate
The link between dogs and the afterlife is very ancient. In Greek mythology Cerberus, the many-headed dog already described by Hesiod, guards the entrance to Hades, preventing the dead from leaving. Hecate, goddess of crossroads and magic, was associated with dogs: in Theocritus's second Idyll the howling of dogs announces the presence of the goddess in the night.
This classical legacy merged with Germanic and Celtic beliefs in which spectral dogs accompany souls or announce death. In British folklore black dogs appear under different names according to the region: the Barghest in Yorkshire, the Gytrash in northern England, Black Shuck in Norfolk and Suffolk. The name Shuck is often linked to the Old English scucca, demon, but the etymology is not certain.
The storm of 4 August 1577
On Sunday 4 August 1577, during a violent thunderstorm, dramatic events took place in two Suffolk churches. At Bungay, according to the pamphlet published the same year by Abraham Fleming, a black dog appeared in the church of St Mary during the service, passed among the kneeling worshippers and killed two of them, while another was badly burned.
On the same day, at Blythburgh, the spire of Holy Trinity church crashed through the roof and some people died. Local tradition attributes to the dog the scorch marks still visible on the north door, known as the devil's fingerprints. The account probably turned the effects of lightning into a demonic apparition, but the date and the damage are attested.
Bungay has made the black dog a civic emblem: a black dog on a lightning bolt appears on the town's weathervane and among its civic symbols. Fleming, the author of the pamphlet, was a London scholar and translator who wrote on the basis of the reports he received, and his text should be read as a moral narrative typical of the age, which saw in natural disasters a sign of divine judgement.
The black dog in literature
The legend has remained alive in modern literature. In 1847 Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, makes her heroine think of the Gytrash from the tales of her childhood when a large dog appears before her at dusk. Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, published between 1901 and 1902, drew on legends of spectral dogs from Dartmoor and the West Country.
Goethe too, in the Faust of 1808, has Mephistopheles appear in the shape of a black poodle that follows the hero to his study. When the animal reveals its true nature, Faust exclaims «Das also war des Pudels Kern!», so that was the poodle's core, an expression that became proverbial in German for the hidden truth of a matter.
The black dog shows how a friendly animal can become, in a different context, the image of fear. Guardian of the borders between life and death, escort of souls, messenger of misfortune: its many figures share the night and the threshold. Bungay and Blythburgh still preserve the memory of that Sunday in 1577, suspended between chronicle and legend.